Teaching, rebuking, correcting & training in righteous web design.

Bible Is Getting Even Friendlier to Programmers

February 13, 2003by meandean

Kudos to all you who have joined me in our effort to get a Bible API from a major Bible publisher. Here is my most recent post on blogs4God.com that describes just how significant and influential your comments and suggestions are/were:

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What better way to celebrate our weekly venture into geekdom than to see the effect Christian techblogging can have on propagating the Gospel to the furthest region of the Earth. Only this time, in yummy SOAP and XML flavors?!

Other sites such as Bible Gateway offer web services in order to search Scripture or link to verses. But the ESV web service uses an Application Program Interface (API) that allows programmers to determine the format in which the text is retrieved. With very little programming, a user can use the web service to retrieve content from the ESV site and use it however they want.

“If I get text from another site, it has their formatting, fonts, and colors,” says Dean Peters, who runs HealYourChurchWebsite.com. “I don’t mind giving a site its due copyright, but their material needs to work in my site. This is the only Bible to offer an API. It allows me as a programmer to say, ‘I want this data and this is how I want it.’ “

One other thought — it would be really helpful if you contacted the good folks at Christianity Today and express to them your grattitude for covering this important topic.

You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. – Matthew 5:13

3 Comments

I am really really really excited about Crossway’s new API. It lets you do 500 queries a day… That’s pretty good for a free service. Indeed, we’ve been waiting for this for a long time. They’re giving access keys out now!

The salt can recover its saltness through fire according to mark and the fire of God comes down on the sacrifice. Leviticus 2:13 tells us that the salt was put on the offering. The believer can recover his saltness and grace and joy when he goes back to the Cross.